A very devastating study on West Papuan resistance movements, written by Australian researcher and activist Jason MacLeod.
Rather than focusing purely on armed struggle or geopolitical abstraction, Merdeka and the Morning Star traces the long history of civil resistance in West Papua: student networks, underground organising, Indigenous governance structures, cultural survival, churches, women’s groups, political prisoners, symbolic protest, and the difficult, often invisible work of maintaining collective identity under occupation.
MacLeod conducted extensive interviews across West Papua and Indonesia, many reproduced directly in the text, creating a work that moves between political theory, oral history, testimony, and structural analysis. The book is deeply attentive to the language of colonial administration, developmental violence, military occupation, and state denial. It examines not only overt brutality but the quieter mechanics of demographic engineering, resource extraction, displacement, bureaucratic containment, and informational suppression. In an Australian context especially, the book sits in uncomfortable proximity to broader Pacific histories of colonial management and strategic silence.
The interview sections are often harrowing. Testimonies of torture, sexual violence, disappearance, and intimidation are presented with very little sensationalism, which makes them hit harder. But the book is equally concerned with resistance as social infrastructure: how people continue organising culture, education, care, ceremony, political memory, and communication under sustained pressure. In that sense it feels less like a distant academic study and more like a forensic anatomy of how power attempts to dissolve a people over time — and how communities refuse disappearance anyway.
Published by University of Queensland Press in 2015 as part of the New Approaches to Peace and Conflict series. Paperback edition in very good condition with minor shelf wear. Clean interior and tight binding.
